Category: Santiago Holmes

The Tortoise was a dive of ill-repute down by the river. It’s clientele smelled worse than the polluted Melanski. The bluer than blue-collar workers drank there. Some were seasonal workers who picked berries in the summer and apples in the fall before heading to warmer climates for the winter. Most often it was filled with workers from the textile mills stopping in to warm their stomachs before heading home in the winter or to cool off with an ice-cold beer after a hot summer day.

Now, the heart of the Tortoise was Berwick’s population of drunks and ne’er-do-wells – a population that increased with the closing of the mills. They kept the seats of the bar filled from the time it opened for the graveyard shift workers still hanging on at the mills at 6am until its doors shut at 2am. Many were the nights Pete Smallman the rat-faced owner, allowed them to curl up in booths or around tables and sleep it off, confident they’d repay the kindness with a couple of rounds when they woke up.

The police spent a minimum of two nights a week at the Tortoise breaking up fights. Throughout the year brawls would break out between out-of-work drunks who needed a night away from home. In the summer and fall they sprinkled in bouts between the seasonal workers and the locals, who appreciated neither color nor foreign tongues. 

It was inevitable the question of who was faster, a tortoise or a hare would come up, and then one of the regulars would turn on his stool and ask a seasonal worker if he thought, as a black man, he had cornered the market on speed. The other men at the bar would laugh and the seasonal worker, whether his English was good or not, would understand he was being offended and rise up to challenge the speaker.

Knives were frequent guests at the Tortoise and with the police would always come an ambulance. More than one combatant over the years had ended up down the road at Mt. Hope, its proximity to the bar a metaphor lost on the bar’s patrons.

Santiago Holmes was a regular at the Tortoise. He was there so often; he had his own stool in the darkest corner, with a two-stool buffer between himself and the next drinker. When he first started drinking, not when he had his first beer, or got drunk off champagne at one of his mother’s parties, but instead, after his parents were gone and he started drinking, he’d come to the Tortoise.

At the Tortoise if you looked old enough – even if you didn’t – and weren’t scared off by Little Jimmy, the massive tattooed cousin of Pete Smallman who worked the door with two knives in eight-inch leather sleeves riding on each of his hips, you could get in. His doughy gut, the black eyes that peered out from behind his bushy black beard and the knives had turned more than one aspiring underage drinker away.

By the time Santiago decided to stop drinking in his rooms above the garage, he’d been working for Pap for a month and had the rough, wiry look of one who spent their day at hard work. The layer of baby fat he’d had through high school melted away with the work and his face took on a more angular, hawkish appearance. He still possessed the arrogance of the elite, which gave him the courage to get past Little Jimmy for the first time at the Tortoise.

Up until that point, his journeys out in public consisted of trips to the grocery store, where he felt the burning hatred in the eyes of the unemployed mill workers’ wives as they passed food stamps or a few precious dollars into the hands of the cashiers. Though the trips were infrequent, he knew he was loathed. Pap took a certain amount of glee in recounting the town gossip he’d picked up over beers at the Tavern of whatever Gram brought home from her ventures into town. Santiago knew where he stood.

After a month, the edge seemed to come off the anger in the stories Pap told, or so Santiago felt. He was still young enough to think drinking alone wasn’t a good thing. Weighing those two ideas, he decided it was time to try and head out into the world for some company while drinking. The town couldn’t stay angry with forever him just because his last name was Holmes, or so his thinking went. Never having had to mix with the blue-collar majority of Berwick, he didn’t realize he could not have been more wrong in his assumptions.

The mill workers of Berwick kept desperate hold of their grudges, not letting go for anything, or anyone, even if the grudge had been resolved. In 1970, the mill workers went on strike for higher wages and a better pension plan. Mr. Holmes, already beginning to feel the financial strains, gave in within a week. More than 40 years later men would gather at the Tortoise and refer back to how ill-treated they had been in 1970 as they discussed their current financial straights.

So when Santiago passed by Little Jimmy and entered the Tortoise, all eyes fell on him. This was normal practice for anyone who entered the bar. What was not normal was the cold fury each set of eyes held.

Many would have crumbled under the weight of those glares, or at worst, have turned and left. Santiago, felt the rage in an instant, and realized people weren’t close to done with their anger. In that moment, he realized he would be treated as an outsider for the rest of his days. He also realized he didn’t give a damn.

He met each set of eyes with a fury of his own; the pent up rage of having been abandoned by his mother and deemed an outcast by a town that didn’t know him reflected back at these hard drinkers in the glare he cast upon them. He took his time, making sure he looked deep into each set of eyes, meeting their hate with his own, until they were forced to look away.

Having established that he would not be bullied, Santiago took the only available seat at the bar: at the far end from the door next to the bathrooms. Pete Smallman, who believed all dollars were created equal, placed a Bud and a shot of Jack in front of him.

As he would every night from that day forth, Santiago sat taking long pulls of his beer and short sips of the whiskey, staring hate out at the world until he felt the arms of drunkenness, calm some of his pain.

Ma raised me on her own. She had some help from Gram and Pap. More Gram than Pap. Pap didn’t much interest in me until I could work. In fact, he told me on my first of work, “Now, you’re interesting.” That was also the year Gram died.

Ma was tough like Pap. She refused to take charity from anyone, so when she was 19 and I was born, she gave up her plans for college and took a job as a teller at the Berwick Trust. She was already a bartender at the Berwick Tavern. She’d been a server for three years before the promotion. After I was born she continued to work three to four nights a week as she felt she couldn’t give up the money. Some nights when she left for the Tavern I’d see Gram shake her head and mutter, “That’s where it all started” as the door closed behind Ma.

I’d ask Ma why she kept working the two jobs, even after she’d been promoted to head teller and was making enough to care for both of us and chip in quite a bit to Gram and Pap.

“You never know what might happen. There may be an emergency of some sort; Pap or Gram might get sick and we might need the extra money. It’s always good to have a back-up plan.”

If Pap was around he’d pipe up with disdain, “or any plan at all. Remember the Five Ps.” This was one of Pap’s favorite slogans: preparation prevents piss poor performance.

Gram would shush him, but not before a look of anger would flash across Ma’s face. “I also do it because I enjoy it,” Ma said.

I think she did like the job, and I know we needed the money, but I think she also liked the attention she received behind the bar and the escape it provided from Gram and Pap’s house. 

It was never spoken of in my presence, but you could feel the rooms of the small house were thick with it in the early years of my life. My birth was a cause of some contention between Ma and Pap. Gram loved me, but the tension between Ma and Pap sat heavy in the air. 

Pap thought I was a parasite or some sort of infectious disease. Whenever possible, he would steer clear of me. If by some chance we were in the same room together, he might upgrade my status to that of a dog by asking me to “fetch a Bud from the fridge” for him. When I’d left the room, I could hear him talking to himself about “the planet’s overcrowded enough without another mouth that can’t feed or do for itself.”

I suspect another reason Ma worked two jobs was so she wouldn’t have to accept anything from my grandparents, who didn’t have much. They lived in the caretaker’s cottage next to the cemetery. That was the biggest part of Pap’s pay: the rent-free housing. Gram didn’t work. She volunteered at the library and the church.

Ma also had a point to prove. Neither one of my grandparents was pleased when I came along – Ma being just 19 at the time – though Gram got over it the fastest, telling Ma, “this is a great thing, we will get through it together.” Pap, harder to please and more upright in his sense of what was proper – despite his rebellious streak – was a different story.

He’d take any opportunity to poke at Ma about my birth. Pap was irate when he found out Ma was pregnant, his anger increasing when she wouldn’t tell him who the father was. Over the years I heard the hint of rumors throughout town, but by the time I understood what they were, Ma had squashed most of them.

She worked two jobs to prove to Pap we could make it without his help. I think she succeeded. By the time I went to work for him in the cemetery, Ma was paying all the utility bills, car payments for both her and Gram and Pap’s cars, all the groceries and whatever other upkeep was required around the house.

It’s easy to see now how much like him she was, though she’d never admit it. Her stubbornness came from him, as did her rigidity and sense of what was proper. I’ve tried to point it out to her, now that I’m older, but she always steers the conversation in a different direction.

Because she worked the two jobs and was caring for me the rest of the time, Ma never had time to go out with friends or go out on dates. I think that’s why she liked the attention working at the bar brought. She needed to interact outside of the stuffy environment of the bank and the cottage. The bar kept her feeling young and in touch with her friends. Everyone in Berwick spent a night or two at the Tavern, unless they were regulars at the Tortoise. 

Santiago Holmes was reviled throughout Berwick. The Holmes family had been the most prominent in the small town for generations but had fallen on harder times toward the end of the 20^thCentury as the desire for the textiles created in their mills dried up and became automated. As the business’ finances deteriorated, Santiago’s father made multiple poor investments in a desperate effort to save the business.

The family’s fall from prominence was rapid and without grace. Santiago’s father died in a fire town lore said he set in one of the mills in an ill-conceived scheme to reap an insurance windfall.

Santiago’s mother, who had a reputation for illicit behavior in Berwick before marrying his father, had left before the funeral with one of Mr. Holmes’ business acquaintances. 

This same acquaintance had convinced the elder Holmes to invest in a start-up technology company – in the infancy of start-up technology companies – he was a silent partner in. Being desperate for any type of innovation that might save the mills, Mr. Holmes ignored the misgivings he felt and pumped money into the tech company even as it faltered. He wore the same blinders into his relationship with his wife.

The business acquaintance and his two partners’ were taking all the money Holmes was investing and paying themselves without producing any product. They had concocted a few income statements showing positive returns and high costs, which they attributed to the start-up nature of the business. They kept telling Mr. Holmes a larger payday was a mere six months down the road.

He was so desperate for any sort of income to help meet his payroll requirements; he took their word as the gospel right up until his end.

Mrs. Holmes and businessman moved across the country and were never heard from again. She took with her what money was left at the time of Mr. Holmes’ passing, leaving Santiago with nothing.

With both of his parents gone the just turned 18-years-old Santiago was left to fend for himself in a town that blamed him as the only remaining Holmes for the failure of the mills and the loss of hundreds of jobs.

The anger of the people of Berwick ran deep. Where once they had given Santiago the benefit of his youthfulness, now their rage blinded them. With his father’s death, they saw him as the cause of their misfortune.

Scorned by the town, not only for the failure of the mills but also because they would no longer look past the air of superiority he had adopted from his mother and lorded over them since he was old enough to take on airs, and with both parents gone, he had nowhere to turn.

Had his father still lived, someone might have taken him in. Despite the failing mills and his arrogance, the town had loved him just a few years before as he had pitched the high school and Legion baseball teams to state championships.

Beyond the amount of Pabst you could handle on a Saturday night, athletic achievement was the next greatest currency in Berwick. It kept Santiago and his loose mouth from trouble on more than one occasion.

The currency gained on the athletic fields had dried up at the time of his father’s death. He had no other skills, having not been required by either of his parents to apply himself in school or in life. On his best days he was an indifferent student whose teachers had done everything in their power to ensure he would pass on to the next grade so as not to have his disruptions in their classrooms.

Though there were a few other people in attendance, he stood alone in the rain at his father’s burial. Pap was waiting in the backhoe to give Mr. Holmes his Last Rites. He sat under the cover of the tractor’s roof, listening to the rain drum it’s beat, waiting for the last of the mourners to leave.

This was the part Pap hated, seeing there was a job to do, and not being able to get it done because of other people. There were always stragglers and he hated waiting on them.

When I was working for him, sometimes I’d sit in the truck with him and he’d complain about having to wait:

“Why don’t they get on with it?” he’d ask.

I would try to stammer together an answer, but I knew nothing would please him.

“We’re going back where we came from, back into the ground. This and taxes,” he’d mutter.

“What and taxes?”

“Death.”

“What about death and taxes?”

“They’re the two things that are inevitable in this world, the two things we can’t run away from, no matter how hard some people try.” Pap had never once paid taxes. “I don’t know why these people come out here and snivel and sniff and make such a fuss about the inevitable.

“I wasn’t a puddle when your gram passed. She’d had a heck of a run, but her time was up. I missed her for a minute, I still do, but I kept on going. You hear stores about these people who can’t get off the couch after a family member dies.

“I mean don’t all these people believer they’re going to a better place? Isn’t that why this bone orchard is here? Shouldn’t these people be happy for those who aren’t down here in this dump anymore?

“And if they need to snivel about it, why can’t they do it at home? Don’t they know we have work to do?”

There weren’t many people in attendance at Mr. Holmes’ graveside service. A couple of town historians showed up out of respect for the family name. They were joined by a couple of regulars from the Tavern and one of the bartenders; about all the family he had remaining in Berwick.

They stood to one side of the hole, feet shuffling in cold discomfort, while Santiago stood alone, hunched in on himself next to the priest. Pap thought the whole scene was ridiculous considering the weather, but figured it would move them along quicker, if the bag of hot air would move his sermon along.

When he finished speaking, he gave Santiago a pat on the back and moved off toward his car. The group from the Tavern left before his door closed. The two historians lingered long enough to give Santiago limp handshakes, leaving the boy by himself, umbrella-less, as the sky opened further.

Another five minutes passed as Pap watched the boy standing alone, not looking at the grave, but instead out through the pines at the river. Starting to feel the dampness in his bones and not wanting to stand out in the wet talking to the police if the boy did throw himself into the Melanski, Pap turned the key in the ignition and set the backhoe in the direction of Santiago.

“Well,” Pap said to the boy whose tears mixed with the rivulets of rain running down his face.

“Well, what?” asked Santiago, defeat taking the place of the aristocratic defiance in his voice.

“You gonna grab a shovel and help or stand there while I do all the work myself? Ground’s too soft for the tractor, so it’s gotta be the shovel.”

Santiago stared at him in disbelief.

“He’s your father.”

“I didn’t have a father.”

“Whatever you say. Go grab a shovel.”

The rain increased in pace as the two bent to their shovels, tossing the muddy earth back into the hole. They worked in silence, each prisoner to his own thoughts.

When they finished laying the last piece of sod Pap took a final walk over the area and spat in the middle of the grave mound. “Better him then me,” he muttered under his breath.” He moved off toward the backhoe, “you coming,” he called to Santiago.

Having nowhere to go and no plan, Santiago followed Pap to the backhoe then walked beside it on the way back to the garage.

While they were tossing dirt back in the hole, Pap had been thinking about what to do with the boy. He had heard the stories at the Tavern, about how the boy’s mother had left and the family was ruined, no money left to their name.

He knew how angry everyone was because of the mill closings, not that it mattered too much to him. He’d made sure to stay out of those death factories, where they broke your back for nickels. 

He also knew how the town could carry a grudge. The week before Roy Doty and Mark Carlisle from the bank had giggled over wine coolers about how they would be foreclosing on the Holmes estate the day after the funeral. They had said nothing about the boy, or what would become of him when the house was gone.

He’d also heard Roy and Mark laugh about how the boy had no job prospects and how no one in the town would hire him because of what his family had done to the people of Berwick.

Pap had no lover lost for the Holmes family. Mr. Holmes had tried to have him fired multiple times because of insults Pap flung his way during his heavier drinking days at the Tavern. To Pap there was right and wrong, and it wasn’t right to attack the boy for something his father had done.

Pap never liked to be on the side of the majority, another reason he had stayed out of the mills. He also hated bankers and comments of Roy and Mark had lived down to his view that all bankers were criminals looking to squeeze every last nickel out of you – Ma was not excluded from this view.

Knowing it would keep with his rebellious nature in Berwick, Pap invited Santiago in to the shop for a beer and to hear his proposition. He pulled two frosty Buds from the fridge and handed one to Santiago. It was the first time anyone had offered Santiago a beer.

Pap watched him take a first uncertain sip, the bitterness of the beer crossing his face before the first swig hit his stomach and filled the hole created by his loss. The boy smiled.

“We start work at 7am,” said Pap.

A look of confusion flashed over Santiago’s face.

“You better get whatever things you have moved over from your house tonight. The apartment above the shop is available. Rent’s $400 a month. I expect three things from you: you show up on time, which shouldn’t be a problem since you’ll be right upstairs, you give me everything you got, even when you don’t have anything, every day, and you make sure your work is perfect. Close enough won’t cut it here.

“Do you have work boots? I imagine not. Take this, and yourself a pair tonight,” Pap said handing him a sheaf of bills, “I’ll take it out of your pay.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Santiago’s mouth, as he understood what Pap’s words meant.

“Quit grinning like an idiot. Odds are I’ll fire you within a week. Even more likely, you’ll quit. Drink your beer and go get your shit.”

And like that, Santiago had the job he would work for the next 40 years.